Microsoft’s approach to open source

"When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future."

Github is not the only technology where developers express concern about Microsoft’s history. For many, this refers to the policies of the nineties and early two-thousands, as well as its past anti-open-source policies. These have radically changed in the past few years. Specifically, Microsoft has embraced open source and to some extent cross platform, some highlights being acquiring Xamarin, releasing Visual Studio Code, and supporting Linux within Windows, as well as internal use of and contribution to git. The Github acquisition follows recent trends.

Finally, Github needed an exit. According to this Ars Technica article, after $350 million of investment and an apparent high rate of money burn, and a (laudable) refusal to charge developers just for hosting, the company needed a buyout. Buying Github may well have saved Github, and is a great benefit to the whole developer community.

Developers

The acquisition of Github may not only be about open source. According to the following quoted Stratchery analysis, it is in fact about customer acquisition:

"This is the context for thinking about the acquisition of GitHub: lacking a platform with sufficient users to attract developers, Microsoft has to “acquire” developers directly through superior tooling and now, with GitHub, a superior cloud offering with a meaningful amount of network effects. The problem is that acquiring developers in this way, without the leverage of users, is extraordinarily expensive; it is very hard to imagine GitHub ever generating the sort of revenue that justifies this purchase price."

RAD Studio and git

Github is used by many of our Delphi and C++Builder users for hosting open source projects. We’d like to encourage you to do this, and in fact to do this more, to make your Delphi and C++Builder projects available and visible.

Finally, we recommend you use source control of some sort, whether that’s git or not, and whether that’s Github, Gitlab or another host. RAD Studio is a core developer tool, with broad support for all major version control systems, including git. Make sure you use one of them.